It’s clear that the world needs more intellectual humility. But how do we develop this virtue? And why do so many people still end up so arrogant? Do our own biases hold us back from becoming as intellectually humble as we could be—and are there some biases that actually make us more likely to be humble? Which cognitive dispositions and personality traits give people an edge at being more intellectually humble - and are they stable from birth, learned habits, or something in between? And what can contemporary research on the emotions tell us about encouraging intellectual humility in ourselves and others?
Experts in psychology, philosophy and education are conducting exciting new research on these questions, and the results have important, real-world applications. Faced with difficult questions people often tend to dismiss and marginalize dissent. Political and moral disagreements can be incredibly polarizing, and sometimes even dangerous. And whether it’s Christian fundamentalism, Islamic extremism, or militant atheism, religious dialogue remains tinted by arrogance, dogma, and ignorance. The world needs more people who are sensitive to reasons both for and against their beliefs, and are willing to consider the possibility that their political, religious and moral beliefs might be mistaken. The world needs more intellectual humility.
In this course, we will examine the following major questions about the science of intellectual humility:
• How do we become intellectually humble?
• What can human cognition tell us about intellectual humility?
• How does arrogance develop, and how can we become more open-minded?
• How do emotions affect our ability to be intellectually humble?
All lectures are delivered by leading specialists, and the course is organised around a number of interesting readings and practical assignments which will help you address issues related to humility in your daily life.
This course can be taken as a part of a series which explores the theory, the science and the applied issues surrounding intellectual humility. In the previous course on the theory behind intellectual humility, we considered how to define intellectual humility, the nature of an intellectual virtue, and how we know who is intellectually humble. If you are interested, complete all three courses to gain a broader understanding of this fascinating topic. Look for:
• Intellectual Humility: Theory - https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-theory
• Intellectual Humility: Practice - https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-practice

Reviews

ED

I found this course to be very timely in this polarized world. I wish these ideas were taught in school.

KR

Feb 16, 2018

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Well-paced, interesting, informative course. Highly recommend.

From the lesson

What makes us arrogant? Biases, heuristics and cognitive psychology

Professor Frank Keil discusses a number of biases which we all have, and which can make us more arrogant and dogmatic by leading us to think that we know more than we actually do. Can you find examples of those biases in the news, and perhaps even in yourself?

Taught By

Dr. Ian Church

Researcher

Professor Duncan Pritchard

Professor of Philosophy

Dr. Emma Gordon

Postdoctoral Researcher

Transcript

This lectures about heuristics and biases and the ways that they create intellectual humility or intellectual arrogance. And we'll start by defining intellectual humility and arrogance so we can have a working definition that will take us forward. We can define intellectual humility in three ways. First of all, we can think of it as an appropriate sense of one's present knowledge limits. This means knowing the extent to which one doesn't know. One is knowledge for example of facts. What facts one does know and what one doesn't know. One's ability to give explanations of how things work and the sense of how well one understands various phenomena in the world. That's one sense. A different sense is it appropriate sense of one's future knowledge limits that is to say what one is likely to know in the future about how the world works or about how various phenomena occur. It can also be what one could know and this means not stuff that one is likely to know but one could know if one choose to know it. So if for example one might think one could fully master quantum mechanics even though one might choose never to do so. And finally, another sense of intellectual humility— intellectual arrogance—is having an appropriate sense of one's cognitive abilities. This overlaps with knowledge but then also include some sense of problem solving skills, calculation skills and any other performance based estimates. What we mean here is that one might think one can think on one's feet very quickly and with great facility. But one might also think that one does necessarily know more than another one can just simply process information more quickly. Now intellectual arrogance we'll think of as roughly the opposite of the intellectual humility. It implies an inflated sense of one's present knowledge, one thinks one knows more than one really does. It implies over-optimism about what one will know, what one could know in the future. So this implies knowing a great deal about what the future is gonna be holding in terms of one's knowledge but not being accurate. And also could include over confidence about one's abilities thinking one's much more able cognitively than one really is. But these aren't precise opposites. Intellectual arrogance may imply pride in social comparison. Something that's not typically applied by intellectual humility. That's to say if one is intellectually arrogant, one tends to think one's much better than one's peers and one's very proud of that fact. It also has intellectual arrogance a certain confidence or certainty associated with it. One is quite confident or certain that one is intellectually superior to one's peers. But if one is intellectually humble one may be not sure about how bad one is maybe may have a great lack of confidence in one's skills or be confident one is actually quite inferior intellectually. So confidence and certainty correlates strongly with intellectual arrogance and not so much with intellectual humility. Now one question that arises here is why there should be intellectual arrogance. It seems so socially undesirable you can ask why is it so common. If it's so unpleasant to be arrogant and it causes alienation others why do we see it? And there seem to be two factors. One would have to do with social motivational constraints namely that various tendencies to self-enhance one's own impression leads one to inflate one sense of competence. But there are also, even if one is not motivated to think one is better than others, potential cognitive biases and heuristics that cause one to inflate one's knowledge of what one knows about the world even though one really doesn't have that knowledge. And these cognitive biases and heuristics are what the focus of our talk will be, because they're particularly interesting. It could be that one really doesn't want to be arrogant but one nonetheless falls into various forms of arrogance because of these biases and heuristics working in ways that often occur outside awareness. These two causes can interact. That is to say social motivational factors may reinforce the biases and the biases may make one feel like better but they also are clearly distinct. So again as I said our focus will be in cognitive biases and heuristics. And we want to define these briefly to get a better sense of what they mean. And we'll think of heuristics as shortcuts in thinking, that entail quicker computation, less intense processing but sometimes at the cost of making errors. So they're shortcuts, they're desirable because they reduce cognitive load, but they do often have costs associated with them. When there's errors that we make are consistently in one direction they're often called biases. Now most researchers consider most heuristics to have some kind of adaptive value. They're there for a reason. We need those shortcuts to get by in our daily lives. One way is thinking about what's happening is what is called sometimes the attribute substitution model of heuristics where difficult questions are often answered by substituting the easier one instead. And so one can think of this is trying to swap out what is a very hard way problem with a simpler one but at a cost because sometimes we'll have the errors. And we'll refer to social motivational factors when they heavily interact with these cognitive biases and that's often true in developmental accounts.

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